Crysis 3: Amazing Graphics, Boring Execution

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The Most Beautiful PC Game We've Ever Seen

Let's get one thing clear up front. Crysis 3's graphics are absolutely stunning. Crytek's latest game doesn't raise the bar -- it annihilates it. At the highest settings, Crysis blows Battlefield 3 out of the water, makes mincemeat of Max Payne, and makes the original Crysis -- itself a graphics powerhouse -- look more like the first Call of Duty. Crysis 3 really is that stunning, provided that you've got the video card to handle it. Like the first game, this title is capable of bringing even a high-end card to its knees; the Radeon 7950 w/ Boost Mode that we used for testing struggled to maintain a 30 FPS frame rate.

The hell of a Cell installation on the left, New York's new look on the right

The good news is that Crysis 3 has no problem with 30 FPS, and cutting detail levels down improves frame rates rapidly. The same Radeon 7950 that struggled to maintain 30 FPS at Very High had no trouble pushing 50+ FPS at Medium. Like the original, this game will scale to match the GPU hardware you have on hand -- and it looks great in all of it.

Rogues gallery -- your NPCs,friend and foe

Normally, I talk about other aspects of a game before discussing its graphics and audio, but in this case, those are the two areas where Crysis 3 really astounds. After Crysis 2 was panned for shipping without DX11 support (and shipping a broken version of that several months later), Cevat Yerli, CEO and President of Crytek, swore that would never happen again.

That's High Detail on the left, Very High Detail on the right. The difference, on a Radeon 7950, is about 8 FPS.

Cevat Yerli swore that he and his team would deliver an uncompromisingly amazing product for the PC. And they did. Everyone who worked in the artistic departments, from character animations to texturing, deserves an award. So does the head composer.